Featured in
Process & Practices

In-App Subscriptions Made Easy

There are various types of subscriptions: recurring, non-recurring, free-trial periods, various billing cycles and any possible billing variation one can imagine. But with lack of information online, you might discover that mobile subscriptions behave differently from what you expected. This article will make your life somewhat easier when addressing an in-app subscriptions implementation.

Featured in
Enterprise Architecture

EIP Designer: Bridging the Gap Between EA and Development

This article presents the EIP Designer project, an Eclipse-based tool for introducing integration patterns into an EA design, providing fluidity and continuity while filling the gap existing between EA practices and concrete software development.

News

Amazon Web Services has recently introduced s2n, short for “signal to noise”, an open-source implementation of the TLS/SSL protocols that aims to be “simple, small, fast, and with security as a priority”.

GitHub has recently started revoking SSH keys that were deemed to be compromised or otherwise insecure. Systems engineer Ben Cartwright-Cox was the author of the research that uncovered the issues. InfoQ has spoken with him.

The third time may be the charm as Microsoft has announced intentions to produce native SSH client and server tools for the Windows platform. Using OpenSSH as a starting point, Microsoft says their goals for the new toolset includes easier system management of both Windows and Linux systems.

In an article published in their blog, ZeroDB team explains how it works. ZeroDB is an end-to-end encrypted database, which means that the database server does not need to be secure for the data to be safe. The way this works is that query logic is being pushed down to the client. The client also holds the decryption keys for data. The client encrypts data with a symmetric key at time of creation

At their re:invent 2014 show Amazon launched AWS Key Management Service (KMS), “a managed service that makes it easy for you to create and control the encryption keys used to encrypt your data, and uses Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) to protect the security of your keys”. At launch the service supported EBS, S3 and Redshift. Additional support for Elastic Transcoder was added in late November.

Netflix have announced the release of the Message Security Layer protocol (MSL), which they describe as ‘A Modern Take on Securing Communication’. The project is available on github under the Apache 2.0 license, with implementations in Java and JavaScript.

Google have announced that they will remove support for the obsolete SSL 3.0 after discovering vulnerabilities that may be exploitable by forcing clients or servers to downgrade. Removing SSL 3.0 may also unlock stalled negotiations with HTTP2. Read on for more details.

CloudFlare have made SSL available to all free subscribers to its content delivery network (CDN) with Universal SSL. The move addresses both cost and complexity issues that have previously confronted web site and application owners wanting to deploy SSL. CloudFlare takes care of issuing a certificate at no cost to the end user, and enabling SSL becomes a selection from a dropdown menu.

Google's Chrome web browser team has announced a schedule to deprecate support for how the browser handles HTTPS certificates using SHA-1 signatures. Over the next 6 months the browser will utilize increasingly noticeable warnings for sites that still use SHA-1.

On Saturday July 26th, an intermediate certificate issued by DigiCert that was used by online services like GitHub, BitBucket, etc expired. Since this certificate was widely cached in the keychains of many Mac OS X users, this expiration caused any connection via browser or API to raise certificate chain errors.

Hadoop distributor Cloudera pursued its strategy of securing the Hadoop ecosystem by acquiring last month the big data encryption and key management startup Gazzang. The deal will strengthen Cloudera's security offering and lead to the creation of a center of excellence for Hadoop security that will initially be fueled by Gazzang’s engineering team.

LibreSSL is the OpenBSD group's response to the Heartbleed security vulnerability that was discovered a few weeks ago in OpenSSL. LibreSSL aims at fully pruning/refactoring OpenSSL to provide a secure and stable code base, fix long standing bugs, introduce modern programming practices, and redesign portability.
After one month of work, it is time for a status update.

Google announced last week that Android 4.1.1 is susceptible to the Heartbleed OpenSSL bug. While Android 4.1.1 is, according to Google, the only Android version vulnerable to Heartbleed, it remains in use in millions of smartphones and tablets. Android 4.1.1 devices have been shown to leak significant amount of data in a "reverse Heartbleed" attack.